Muslim Mandarins in Chinese Courts: Dispute Resolution, Islamic Law, and the Secular State in Northwest China

Abstract

Many sociolegal studies have investigated the relationship between state law and informal law, examining alternative dispute resolution and popular justice as intersections between such types of law. However, such questions have received little attention in East Asian authoritarian states. I use the case of dispute resolution among Chinese Muslim minorities (the Hui) to reexamine the relationship between state law and Islamic law. Based on nineteen months of fieldwork in Northwest China, I argue that the Hui case shows codependence between the types of law. Law is deeply embedded in social relationships between the Hui and the party‐state. An analysis of personalistic relationships shows the ways in which religious and secular authorities access each other, transforming each other's law to augment their own legitimacy, but not without the potential for violence. The China case illuminates dynamics between Muslim communities and states that are prevalent elsewhere in the post‐9/11 period.

Love, money and ethnicity: money’s role in polygamous marriages among the Hui in Northwest China

“…This research has described the importance of money in the intimate relationships of the Hui, who occupy a specific social and cultural context. A gap in the previous research indicates that very few researchers (Jaschok and Shui, 2000;Zang, 2005Zang, , 2007Erie, 2015) have focused on the intimate experiences of the ethnic Hui, especially the experiences of Hui women, under the rapid development of China's economy and modernization. If ethnic consciousness enables the Hui to embrace their ideological differences, then their personal desires regarding economics and affection can be explained in terms of agency and individualism within the national transformation associated with neoliberal economic policies.…”

“Why Don’t You Go to the Mosque?” Epistemic Deference and Everyday Religious Practices in Hui Muslim Communities

“…4 Erie notes that Hui clerics invoke this authority on matters of religious doctrine through the use of the phrase jiaofa (religious law) to assert that dictates concerning observation of ritual practice are legal matters rather than matters of etiquette (Erie 2016, 38-39). 5 The power held by religious authorities in Hui communities is potent enough that, in many cases in Hui communities in northwest China, the state actively enlists clerics to mediate disputes that involve religious as well as secular law, and oversee resolution processes (Erie 2016, 60;Erie 2015).…”

"Jurisprudential Massage": Legal Fictions, Sectarian Citizenship, and the Epistemics of Dissent in Post-socialist China

“…In the past decade, scholarly debates about the possibility of legal redress in authoritarian societies (Lai and Slater 2006; Whiting 2017) have brought attention to China's continuous reliance on informal means of dispute resolution. A panoply of multidisciplinary case studies now testifies to the ubiquity and versatility of this legal form (e.g., Erie 2015; Balme 2016; for a review, see Sida Liu and Wang 2015). Importantly, this literature has highlighted the key institutional role played by dispute mediation in smoothing out the potentially highly fraught transition from the Maoist planned economy to a capitalist market one (Peerenboom and He 2009, 25; S. Zhu 2016, 127–29).…”

“…And yet, this revamped interest in dispute mediation can still be faulted for trading in the same old homeostatic currency of functionalism, that is, the flattening of the discourse of law on to the exigencies of power (Pirie 2013, 31, 187). In a context such as the People's Republic, this usually entails using mediation to test the correlation between the deregulation of justice and regime stability (e.g., Erie 2015, 1003; Hu and Zeng 2015, 47; Gallagher 2017, 30). While this line of inquiry has much to recommended it, its latent legal pragmatism—the conflation of the assumed social ends of law (stability) and its institutional means (mediation)—creates a source of unwanted inconsistency.…”